CIRCLE WITH A DOT

To break out of my creative shell, I want to try recording some covers. I have some ideas of my own, but I want more. Please, if I take your recommendation, I promise I will try not to butcher it completely.

@GayDeceiver

When we were in India, we bought something called an "enchilarga," which was a subcontinental vibe cooking attempt at an enchilada. It was like an egg roll the size of your head. There were peas and okra in it. It was literally edible in the worst way.

How I'll sleep if TSA never gets funded ever again:

Seeing people singing with genuine enthusiasm in their cars keeps me from losing hope.

Just noticed this on my kids' box of Frosted Flakes. Why would you need to specify that your mascot, the cartoon you invented for the purpose of advertising your sugared wheat shards, endorses your cereal? Is your spokestiger moonlighting for some other brands? Are his affections (which are, again, the product of your own internal marketing committeebrains) for your mouth-lacerating breakfast razors in doubt? Who is this for?

One of the hardest things for me is the need to lock into an emotionally resonant concept. It's way harder to combine notes and words without that. I have written a lot of stuff I don't like and won't share because it frankly feels forced and bad. I think about my friends all the time and I miss them. Writing about getting older and tracing my friends' lives feels sincere in a way that writing about my cat and some airports doesn't.

House.
I walked to your house from my house. It took hours.
Sidewalks I walked when I was still young.
Grown through and grown over. Grass, chamomile, alder,
smoke, tar and asphalt, exhaust.
You'd think home was the first thing we lost.
You can't live in the past, there's no past.
You can't live in a headstone, you can't.
You are a house
Nobody lives in a house
You are a house
Nobody lives in a house.

I drove out of my way a few minutes.
I circled sunken graves for an hour.
There's a cure now, but that doesn't matter.
I found you; I should have brought flowers.
Singing “Twilight,” I almost forgot.
You'd think you were the first thing we lost.
If you can't live in the past,
You can't live at all.
You are a house
But no one lives in a house now.
You are a house
Nobody lives in a house
Nobody lives in a house.

[I'm working on an album about the friends I played music with in high school and where all of us ended up. It is a middle-aged millennial's nostagia record. This one is for a friend who had cystic fibrosis and died at 19. He would have loved The World Is A Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, and I wrote this inspired by listening to their song "Gig Life" a few too many times.]

@LRRRonEarth

We can't all be like you, you giant leftover-thieving asswipe.

My current pet peeve is when people call words "attacks," "force," or "violence," or the like. I know words are powerful; I believe it. I bet my life on words. But the phenomenon of insulting, degrading, disagreeing, challenging, opposing, or otherwise saying things someone doesn't like is fundamentally different than using physical force. Conflating forceful language with force leads nowhere good.

Finally, a place to store all my skin:

I have a very pre-DTMFA approach to friends and family. I can't think of anyone whom I have affirmatively cut out of my life. I enjoy people who, like me, cling tight to their bullshit like a dog mangling the leg of a mail carrier. One of my friends is obsessed with soccer performance metrics and modeling team cohesion stuff, and I love hearing him out. Another is a theologian who is now a crazy person living in a cabin in the woods, and he will teach me fabulous things about Gnosticism on a seemingly unbreakable monologue until I tap out. These are not easy friends to have or keep, but I do it because it's so worthwhile. But it's hard to sustain that commitment for someone whose overriding favorite topic is themselves.

Meanwhile, my buddy who went crazy and now lives in a cabin in the woods shows up to the biweekly Shadowdark sessions every single time. He brings snacks. He needs and entertains us, and we love and support him.

I went on a walk in the woods with my kids and a longtime buddy of mine, and the whole time, literally the whole time, he talked about what a massive sacrifice to his sense of self it was to leave a Very Big Important Lawyer Job to go to another, slightly less prestigious Very Big Important Lawyer Job and how people would never respect him again. My son caught a minnow. My daughter saw maybe her first butterfly. And this guy just could not shut the fuck up about how he was going to be a pariah forever for becoming in-house counsel at a fancy company earning more than I make in two years. I wanted to stab him.

As someone who makes what I consider to be perfectly normal compromises all the time for the sake of my happiness and sanity, my patience is very limited for nominal adults who bitch for hours about status signifiers at rarefied brass-ring prestige jobs or trivial and frivolous dating dealbreakers. Just have a weird, messy life, dawg. Nobody cares. You will die sad.

I have lost two friends over the last year or so. Were they losers? No! Both were emotionally stunted and conventionally successful. They were also boring as shit.

Did you know you can have friends who are losers? It's fine. It's great, even. They're great. You don't need impressive friends. That's foolish. Losers make excellent friends.